Stories

One day in June, 1978, when I was twenty-three and living in Barcelona, a friend mentioned that a charter flight that weekend was offering very cheap one-way seats to Dublin. In that second, it came into my head that I might go—pack up my apartment, leave for good. Three days later, I was back home in Ireland.

In the years that followed, I often wondered what might have happened had I stayed in Barcelona that summer and spent the days on one of the nearby beaches with a guy I was seeing then and the nights at his apartment in the city, had I stayed into the winter and then into the following year. It’s possible that I might never have gone home.

After I left, I wrote to the guy, and he wrote back. There were postcards. Then I changed my address. We lost touch. He became what might have been. All I had was a sharp memory of the time we spent together, of things he said, of his way of smiling as he spoke—everything amused him—and of the apartments where we had been, and the nights. I adapted some of these things in my fiction. (I have changed some identifying details here, as well.)

In 2008, on the wall of a bar in Barcelona, I spotted a poster for a group show in a gallery. His name was listed toward the bottom. It was as if his sweet shadow, thirty years older, had come back for a second. I saw that the show was already over, but I noted down the name of the gallery, which, once I went home to Ireland, I mislaid. But I knew, at least, that he was still alive, that he had survived. Sometime when I was in Spain again, I thought, I would try to find him, or just leave one of my books at his gallery.

One night, two years ago, I found an e-mail address for him online, and I sent him a message. A few days later, I got a reply. After some more e-mails, we arranged to meet the next time I was in Barcelona. And finally we set a date for it, and a place—a bar that used to be fashionable but is now too close to the tourist trail.

He had aged and grown thinner; he needed to wear glasses, but he had all his hair, which was more than I could say. He was more serious than before, more of a reader, and wanted to talk about novels and poetry. He had read some of my books in translation. The next day, we went to look at some of his paintings in a public gallery. His work, like him, had become more pure and austere.

When we saw each other a second time, not long ago, I asked him to retell a story that I had been dining out on for years. When he was called up for military service, in 1974, he and his mother went to see a psychiatrist, who gave them very precise instructions about the body language and general pathology of a mother and son who could not be separated under any circumstances. I remember his mother; she was a fine-boned, good-humored woman, who was taller and bigger than my friend. They rehearsed what they would do for the military doctors. They were to behave normally and answer all questions as though there were no problem at all, until the moment when the mother stood up to go. And then the son was to make a mad rush at her. He was to scream hysterically. He was to drool and shake as she fondly embraced him and comforted him. They did this so well that they were instantly dismissed, and this meant that my friend did not have to do military service.

I have been thinking about this story for years, and telling it to people. I am sure that it happened. I was there when they came home. Or maybe I was there the next day. But I was there.

My friend looked puzzled when I asked him about this. He had no idea what I was talking about. It was asthma, he said. The military doctors let him off because of asthma. And his mother was, in any case, not taller than he was, and also she was never in Barcelona back then. I could not have met her.

I assured him that it had happened. I swore.

He sipped his drink. It must be all that fiction you are writing, he said. And the old smile came back, more ambiguous now, wiser. Maybe he felt that I had used him in enough stories, or he thought that it was none of my business after all these years. Or maybe the story itself had simply improved the more I told it, had got better and less true as time went on. If only I hadn’t seen him again, I would be more sure. ♦